Today we are using Catalyst Control Center to overclock the card, as many of our usual tools don’t yet support the new architecture.

We managed to push the core to 1015mhz, which is a great achievement for a reference cooled card. We would expect further gains when AMD partners release their nhanced custom cooling solutions over the next couple of months. Initially we managed to overclock the GDDR5 memory to around 1,500mhz, but we noticed some very minor artifacting past 1430mhz and decided to settle on the safest figure possible.

The overclock helped to increase the overall 3DMark 11 score from 7904 points to almost 8,400 points. A very healthy increase indeed.

Very nice, but im more interested in the 7950, and the pricing. this is just too expensive IMO.

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Brian Ha

Good performance, and nice to see them improving the cooler a little. the HD6990 cooler is insanely loud. I am surprised that it doesn’t cost around £399 inc vat as AMD have always been competitive on pricing. t his seems over the odds IMO.

AMD Radeon HD 7970 a little disappointing. I hope the HD 7970 uses ultra-fast memory such as Rambus XDR2 and able to achieve perfect HQV score of 120. The use of PCI Express 3.0 by the HD 7970 also does not provide significant improvement.